Read Biographies

By CHARLES OKOH

There are loads of lessons you can learn from reading biographies. The one lesson I have learned is that successful people fail far more often than unsuccessful people. Successful people stick to their goals painstakingly. Unsuccessful people try a few things; fail somewhere along the line and more often than not quit.

Once upon a time, there lived a great inventor called Thomas Edison. He was a tenacious man.He performed over 10,000 experiments before he discovered the electric bulb. How many of you, including me the writer, would be patient enough to try a particular task a thousand times- let alone ten thousand? But Edison did! He was a possibility thinker. A reporter once inquired of him how he felt to have failed 10,000 times in his present venture. His response was “I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Biographies are very educative. Read the biography of the rich. Read the biography of the famous and not too famous. Find out how they became successful or how they got trapped by failure. Then program your life to achieve greatness- bearing in mind that each breaking day comes with obstacles as well as new opportunities. When you study those who have succeeded where you intend to succeed, you will know what to do and what not to do. Admiral Hyman Rickover said, “Learn from the mistakes of others; you will never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

The story of renowned neurosurgeon, Ben Carson is an inspiring one. It urges young people to read in order to achieve greatness. Carson was born into relative lack. But he moved against the odds from the streets of Detroit and rose to national and international prominence in modern medicine.

Let’s glance through one more story. It is a biography on the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was created by Melissa Kelly of About.com using the educational biographical framework.


Sir Isaac Newton - English Mathematician and Physicist
By Melissa Kelly, About.com Guide

Birth:
25th December 1642, Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire

Death:
20th March 1727, Kensington, London - buried in Westminster Abbey

Early Influences:
• Father was a farmer who died before his birth
• Mother recognized his talents and encouraged him to get educated
• Uncle recommended that he should be sent to Trinity College, Cambridge

Education:
• Educated at Grantham
• Attended Cambridge University, 1661
• Elected a Fellow of Trinity College, 1667
• Became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics

Major Accomplishments:
• Devised many solutions to contemporary problems in analytical geometry
• Invented Calculus
• Wrote the Principia which outlined the Newtonian Laws of Motion
• Elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to the

Convention Parliament of 1689
• Wrote Opticks in 1692
• Became Mater of the Royal Mint in 1699
• Became President of the Royal Society of London in 1703 and remained President until his death
• Knighted in 1705

Significance:
• Regarded for almost 300 years as the founder of modern physical science
• Responsible for completing the scientific revolution
• His Laws of Motion and works in mechanics are seen as among humanities greatest achievements in abstract thought
• His Principia is regarded as the greatest scientific book ever written

Contemporaries:
• Edmond Halley - English Astronomer
• Robert Hooke - English Experimental Scientist
• Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz - German Mathematician